A child asked the mother, “Is Jesus like anybody I know?” It is possible to find dim reflections of Christ’s beauty in His true followers; yet we don’t need to turn to human lives, even the most perfect, to learn what Jesus was like, for we can see him in the Gospel story for ourselves. We have no excuse for not knowing what the ideal is, for a true human life.
The next thing, when we have the vision of Christ before us, is to get it implanted into our own life. Someone says, “God never yet permitted us to envision theory too beautiful for His power to make practical.” This is true, and yet never without toil and struggle can we make an honorable character for ourselves. We cannot merely dream ourselves into worthy manhood or womanhood, we must forge for ourselves, with sweat and anguish, the nobleness that shall shine before God and man.
In the presence of a great painting, a young artist said to Mr. Ruskin, “Ah! if I could put such a dream on canvas.” “Dream on canvas!” growled Ruskin. “It will take ten thousand touches of the brush on the canvas—to make your dream come true!”
It is easier to put on canvas the artist’s dreams—than to put upon our human lives the beautiful visions of Christlikeness which we find on the Gospel pages. Yet that is the real problem of Christian living. And though hard, it is not impossible. If we but struggled and tried and worked, in our efforts to get our visions of character translated into reality, as artists do to paint their visions on canvas, or carve them in stone—we would all be very noble. Never yet has an ideal been too high to be realized at last, through the help of Christ.—-Yet the cost is always high to carve the beauty God shows us—as an ideal for our lives. It costs self-discipline, oftentimes anguish, as we must deny ourselves, and cut off the things we love. SELF must be crucified if the noble manhood in us is ever to be set free to shine in its beauty—if the angel within the marble block is to be unimprisoned. Michelangelo used to say, as the chips fell thick and fast from the piece of marble in his studio, “While the marble wastes—the image grows.” There must be a wasting of self, a chipping away continually of the things that are dear to our sinful human nature, if the things that are true and pure and just and lovely are to be allowed to come out in us. The marble must waste—while the image grows! It is not easy to become a godly man, a Christlike man. Yet we must never forget that it is possible. God never yet put into a soul a dream of noble character, which He is not able and ready to help make real.–J. R. Miller
